Venice Horizons Winner Anuparna Roy Returns to Lido With ‘Lovers in the Blue Night’

Indian filmmaker Anuparna Roy is returning to the Venice Film Festival with her second feature, “Lovers in the Blue Night,” just one year after making history as the first Indian director to win the Horizons best director prize for her debut, “Songs of Forgotten Trees.” The new film will screen in the Horizons competition at this year’s edition.

The project originated from Roy’s childhood in a coastal region near the Bangladesh border and the Bay of Bengal. She lived with the memory of Ameena, a bonded laborer in her hometown, particularly after Ameena shared reflections on her marriage that stayed with the director long after she left home. That recollection eventually became the narrative seed for the new film.

“Lovers in the Blue Night” follows four migrants navigating life in Mumbai. At the center are Karim, a closeted gay man married to Ameena, and Sukka, a man seeking escape from caste constraints who is Karim’s lover. Roy has said she aimed to portray their hardships without letting displacement entirely define them, resisting the idea that their ordinary desires for intimacy, jealousy and tenderness should be erased by their circumstances.

She also resisted framing a straightforward romantic escape as liberation. Early drafts initially cast Ameena’s arc in a more rebellious tone, with the character ultimately finding real love and leaving her marriage. As the script developed, Roy recognized that outcome as another iteration of patriarchal constraint rather than genuine freedom.

Roy describes love in the film as a form of resistance for characters who face punishment simply for wanting things. She said that when people are lonely or displaced, small gestures of intimacy can feel monumental. Roy referred to this dynamic as the “illusion of love,” a space where affection, longing, isolation, need and fantasy overlap so heavily that individuals often fall for the possibility of someone as much as the person themselves.

One specific sequence stood out to Roy: Karim works as a pest controller, producing rat poison and killing rats in wealthy Mumbai housing societies. The role was inspired by a worker Roy observed in the Andheri East suburb. She described the image of him returning home to kiss another man as “no less than revolutionary,” noting that placing that domestic intimacy beside his labor felt deeply political.

While “Songs of Forgotten Trees” focused on two women confined mostly to a single house and was made under difficult funding conditions, “Lovers in the Blue Night” expands its scope and underwent a more professional production process with defined deadlines. International sales for the new film are handled by Parallax.

When asked whether she expected the new work to be selected for Venice’s main competition instead of Horizons, Roy said she dreamed of that possibility but did not expect it, adding that returning to the section was not a disappointment. She continues to view herself as a new director learning alongside filmmakers she admires.

Both films are connected by Roy’s personal experiences of floods during her youth. In each story, characters are forced into exile after their homes are destroyed, though the new feature shifts focus to two men and explores the duality of bisexuality.

Roy has also begun developing future projects, including a romantic feature titled “In the Shadow in the Light” about a dysfunctional marriage inspired partly by her parents, as well as an untitled project centered on a woman’s sexual transit.